In 2010, Nebraska passed the first state law banning abortions at 20 weeks of gestation and beyond. Tuesday, South Carolina became the 18th state to do so, although some of them effectively ban abortion at 18 weeks. The vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act passed the S.C. House of Representatives by a 79-29 vote. The state senate passed the bill in March by 36-9. Gov. Nikki Haley is certain to sign it into law.
Passage of these 20-week bans, another of the forced-birther tactics in the drive to ban all legal abortions, is predicated upon the view that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks gestation. Neurologists and other members of the medical community dispute that claim.
Like all but one of the other state 20-week bans, South Carolina’s includes no exceptions for rape or incest. The only exceptions are when the life of the mother is at risk and when fetal anomalies mean no chance of survival outside the womb. More than half the 20-week state bans have no exception for fetal anomalies whatsoever. South Carolina’s ban also includes an inadequate health exception for the mother. Physicians who violate the law can be punished with a $10,000 fine and up to three years in prison. Harriet McLeod reports:
"This is a dangerous bill for South Carolina women ..., made even more extreme by removing exceptions for victims of rape and incest," Alyssa Miller, South Carolina director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, said in a statement.
"The reality is that abortion later in pregnancy is extremely rare and often takes place in complex and difficult situations where a woman and her doctor need every medical option available," Miller said.
Abortions at 20 weeks and afterward are rare. In fact, an average of just 28 women undergo such abortions in South Carolina every year. Nationwide, about 1.3 to 1.5 percent of abortions take place at 20 weeks or later. NARAL, the national abortion rights advocacy organization notes why these late-term abortions are necessary:
A number of fetal and genetic anomalies cannot be identified until later in pregnancy, and some women find themselves facing pregnancies gone terribly wrong. Health conditions that threaten the woman’s life or health can develop at any point during a pregnancy. And a large share of women seeking abortions late in the second trimester do so because they face dramatically changed life circumstances or were unable to obtain an earlier abortion—a situation that’s increasingly common in states where laws are making abortion more expensive, more time-consuming, and more geographically inaccessible.
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin are the other states that have passed 20-week bans. The courts have overturned the laws in three states: Arizona, Georgia, and Idaho. The Supreme Court has so far not accepted a case in the matter, although it chose in 2014 not to take on an appeal of a lower federal court’s decision to overturn one of the bans.
Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a right to abortion nationwide, used the measure of fetal viability to determine when the states had an interest in curtailing the procedure. Viability is viewed by medical authorities to be at about 24 weeks’ gestation. Which should mean that all these 20-week bans are flat-out unconstitutional. But until the Supreme Court rules against them, we can expect other states to pass their own bans to the roster and add another notch to the forced-birthers’ campaign to curtail women’s reproductive rights.
